USA — DOD Awards $227 Million in Research Funding

The Depart­ment of Defense (DoD) announced plans today to make 32awards to aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions to per­form mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary basic research. The total amount of the awards is expect­ed to be $227million over five years. Awards are sub­ject to the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of nego­ti­a­tions between the aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tion­sand DoD research offices that will make the awards: the Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Sci­en­tif­ic Research (AFOSR).

The awards are the result of the fis­cal 2010 com­pe­ti­tion that ARO, ONR, and AFOSR con­duct­ed under the DoD Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Uni­ver­si­ty Research Ini­tia­tive (MURI) pro­gram. The MURI pro­gram sup­ports research by teams of inves­ti­ga­tors that inter­sect more than one tra­di­tion­al sci­ence and engi­neer­ing dis­ci­pline in order to accel­er­ate both research progress and tran­si­tion of research results to appli­ca­tion. Most MURI efforts involve researchers from mul­ti­ple aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions and aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments. Based on the pro­pos­als select­ed in the fis­cal 2010 com­pe­ti­tion, a total of 67academic insti­tu­tions are expect­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the 32research efforts. 

The MURI pro­gram com­ple­ments oth­er DoD basic research pro­grams that sup­port tra­di­tion­al, sin­gle-inves­ti­ga­tor uni­ver­si­ty research by sup­port­ing mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary teams with larg­er and longer awards. The awards announced today are for a five year peri­od sub­ject to avail­abil­i­ty of appro­pri­a­tions and sat­is­fac­to­ry research progress. Con­se­quent­ly, MURI awards can pro­vide greater sus­tained sup­port than sin­gle-inves­ti­ga­tor awards for the edu­ca­tion and train­ing of stu­dents pur­su­ing advanced degrees in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing fields crit­i­cal to DoD, as well as for asso­ci­at­ed infra­struc­ture such as research instrumentation. 

The MURI pro­gram is high­ly com­pet­i­tive. ARO, ONR, and AFOSR solicit­ed pro­pos­als in 30 top­ics impor­tant to DoD and received a total of 411 white papers, which were fol­lowed by 152 pro­pos­als. The awards announced today were select­ed based on mer­it review by pan­els of experts. 

The list of projects select­ed for fis­cal 2010 fund­ing may be found on the Web at: http://www.defense.gov/news/d20100716MURI.pdf .

Source:
U.S. Depart­ment of Defense
Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense (Pub­lic Affairs)